“WE HAVE A HUGE WAY TO GO”: WHY SLEEPING DUCK DECLINED TO SHARE THEIR MATTRESS WITH A SHARK

The engineers behind rapid-growth mattress startup Sleeping Duck dived into the Shark Tank, this week, but surfaced without a deal, after knocking back offers, worth half a million, from both Andrew Banks and Steve Baxter. As they told Dynamic Business, the ‘deal breaker’ wasn’t the equity each shark demanded; rather, they weren’t convinced either could help take their business to the next level.     

Sleeping Duck was ‘hatched’ by Melbourne duo Selvam Sinnappan and Winston Wijeyeratne in January 2014 as an alternative to what they saw as a ‘frustrating, in-store experience’; namely, shopping for a new mattress. Sinnappan commented, “Going through 40 to 50 mattresses, with prices ranging from as low as $200 to as high as $10,000, made for one of the most confusing, expensive and tedious processes I’d ever been through. How can you know a mattress suits you by only sleeping on it for 15 minutes in store? Even if you take one home, there’s still no guarantee that you will get the best night’s sleep possible”.

According to Wijeyeratne, Sinnappan’s background in civil engineering, as well as his own in aerospace, enabled the pair to “ascertain very quickly what materials were going into the products on the market and where the large cost variations were”. From there, they combined pocket springs, gel-infused memory foam and natural latex to produce a customisable mattress, which is shipped, compressed, in a box “about a quarter the size” of the actual product. Read more

James Harkness - Dynamic Business - 21 July 2017